Announcing: Winners of the Email Subject Line Contest

You might remember that in December, we worked together with the team at MarketingExperiments.com to run an email subject line contest.

In order to preserve the integrity of the test, we didn’t announce any of the finalists before the test was run. But today we’re announcing all 10 finalists, as well as the final winner of the split test.

The quest? To find a subject line that would get their email opened — but also, acted on, in the form of a click through to the offer being made.

The prizes? The writer of the subject line that generated the most unique clickthroughs has won a complimentary ticket to Email Summit 2014. MarketingSherpa is also putting that talented winner up in the host hotel, the Aria Resort & Casino, for two nights.

And the writer of the subject line that got the highest open rate has won complimentary access to the MECLABS Email Messaging Online Course. (Clickthrough was MarketingSherpa’s primary KPI, or key performance indicator, but opens were a secondary KPI.)

How did we choose our finalists?

On the Copyblogger side, we had more than 300 entries to the contest, and the editorial team looked carefully at each one.

First, the ones we didn’t go with.

Based on our own experience and a mountain of research, we knew that “clever but unclear” would result in poor open rates. So even though “Meet The Guy We Gave $2000 To Write This Sentence at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014″ actually made Daniel over at MarketingExperiments laugh out loud, it didn’t make our final cut.

And what is it we want to be clear about? An important benefit of the offer, as well as concrete information about the offer deadline.

To follow spam laws (and preserve MarketingSherpa’s reputation) we didn’t include any that might be considered misleading. “You have won $10,000″ will always get opens — but that doesn’t make it a good email subject line.

And finally, MarketingSherpa was not able to consistently personalize across this entire list, so headers with personalization couldn’t be fairly tested and therefore were left out.

The finalist competitors indicated a clear benefit in the subject line, as well as being intriguing enough that we believed they had a good shot at that click.

The 5 runners-up from Copyblogger

We sent these 5 entries over to MarketingSherpa for the experiment.

FMH
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